Saturday, June 09, 2012

Doomsayers never learn

A group of international scientists is sounding a global alarm, warning that population growth, climate change and environmental destruction are pushing Earth toward calamitous - and irreversible - biological changes.

In a paper published in Friday's edition of the journal Nature, 22 researchers from a variety of fields liken the human impact to global events eons ago that caused mass extinctions, permanently altering Earth's biosphere.

"Humans are now forcing another such transition, with the potential to transform Earth rapidly and irreversibly into a state unknown in human experience," wrote the authors, who are from the U.S., Europe, Canada and South America.

In 1968, in his best-selling book The Population Bomb, scientist Paul Ehrlich declared: "In the 1970s the world will undergo famines -- hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death."

His responds about his assessment, "It has gotten a lot worse. ... The book was basically much too optimistic." He says that he did not know about global warming, AIDS, and ozone depletion.

We did not have anyone killed by famines. The dire predictions about global warming, AIDS, and ozone depletion have not happened. Ehrlich not only makes bad predictions, he cannot recognize when he is wrong.